Felarca is clear that the Berkeley rioters did not get “out of hand.” They weren’t victimized by a few hotheads who got violent and made the rest look bad. What the Berkeley rioters did was the result of planning. “It’s not spontaneous,” she says at the end of the interview. “This is about organizing and fighting by any means necessary.”

Felarca and the group she leads—the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary aka By Any Means Necessary or BAMN—has history of gain engaging in violent protest. She was an activist in the Occupy movement and in Black Lives Matter-connected protests at the University of California at Berkeley.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Friday that the administration “knew” who the protesters were, but there was no indication that Spicer was aware of the involvement of Felarca, who was involved last year in the Burlingame, California protest that forced Donald Trump and his Secret Service detail to leave their vehicle.

BAMN sees no distinction between admitted white supremecists and people who support President Trump, and considers both valid targets for attacks. Last summer, members of the neo-Nazi group the Traditionalist Workers Party on a permitted march were physically attacked by a group of about 400 protesters organized by BAMN.

It is horrible that Felarca sees no difference between white supremacists and conservatives (or pretends not to see it). But it is even more outrageous that she attacks people for expressing their views, no matter how reprehensible. The First Amendment means that you can’t punish people for what they say—even neo-Nazis.

Note in the interview that Felarca blames the Chancellor for the vandalism carried out by the Berkeley rioters because, when they threatened violence, he did not cancel the event. In saying that, she has admitted to attempting to use blackmail to end the First Amendment for people she doesn’t like.

She’s a criminal according to the words coming out of her own mouth.

By the way, she’s also a Middle School teacher who kept her job despite her violent actions by claiming the school violated her First Amendment rights.

A Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School teacher filed a lawsuit against the Berkeley Unified School District on Wednesday alleging in part that the school district violated her first amendment rights by placing her on involuntary paid leave based on her involvement with a political group.

Yvette Felarca, the plaintiff of the case, was placed on involuntary paid leave in September 2016 after being placed under investigation for “inappropriate conduct.” In June 2016, Felarca attended an anti-racism protest in Sacramento, at which she was filmed taunting and punching a member of a white nationalist group. Violence escalated at the event, and she and other protesters were stabbed by another white nationalist.

I doubt the school ever planned to fire her. But they had to investigate and the suspension was not unusual for a teacher being investigated.

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.